Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google’s rankings. When Knol launched, somepeopleaskedquestions about this. I dutifully trundled around the web and said that Knol wouldnotreceiveanyspecialbenefits in our scoring/ranking for search. With the benefit of six months’ worth of hindsight, I hope everyone can agree that Knol doesn’t get some special boost or advantage in Google’s rankings.

In my opinion, Knol is doing just fine. It’s weird that in just a few months, the conventional wisdom can change from “Google will give Knol unfair boosts in ranking; it will dominate the space!” to “Oh, Knol gets so little traffic that it’s not a success.” The rapid change in perception gives me a little bit philosophical whiplash. The fact is that neither of these perceptions is true. Mashable made a point that “it took Wikipedia almost two years to reach a similar number of pages.”

The Knol team is not standing still. Some of the ways I’ve learned to estimate whether a team will be successful is how high-impact their project is, but also 1) how quickly they can iterate and 2) how they react to feedback. I consider the Google Chrome team very successful, for example. They roll out a new version of Chrome about once a week, and I see them pay attention and prioritize based on feedback. In the same way, you probably haven’t noticed it, but the Knol team has been steadily delivering new releases over the last six months. Knol has more polish, more features, and the team has listened to the outside world when they plan what to work on next.

My personal conception of Knol is that when you want to write a quick article or put some information on the web, Knol is a great place to do it. If you already have a blog, you could always stuff the info on your blog. But a ton of people occasionally want to post some info but don’t have or want a blog. Imagine if you’ve searched the web for some piece of info and didn’t find exactly what you wanted (maybe there isn’t any good content about using red widget A with blue operating system B). By the time you’ve finished searching, you might be an expert about that micro-niche. That’s a perfect time to document what you’ve learned, and if you want an easy place to store that info, Knol can serve that need.

Matt – Glad to see you giving a little buzz to Knol here. I’d guess that a lot of people haven’t looked at it lately and don’t know that the comment feature (used by many to instantly reveal attempted spamming) is now there. Will be interesting to watch Knol mature.

Dave (originial), even above that (and in the title) it says “Knol: a unit of knowledge.” That’s the definition I prefer, but certainly Knol does aspire to contain high-quality, authoritative, very informative articles. The fact that people from across the web can create their own knols means that some will knols will be authoritative but not every knol will be that way.

Agreed, Charlie Anzman. I think a lot of people know Knol-from-six-months-ago, but haven’t seen some of the newer features. Some of the big things:
– Ability to see related knols. For example, if you’re looking at this knol about the BlackBerry, you can see a bunch of related knols on the right-hand side of the page.

– You can write a knol in 8 or more different languages. In some languages like Arabic, it can be really useful to have a convenient place to add information. The web needs more content in lots of different languages, and I think Knol can help with that.

– You can now get email notifications and Atom feeds for knols.

– Better profile pages

– Ability to add a lot more different kinds of content, from videos to slideshows to spreadsheets to survey forms.

That quite a lot of changes and improvements in a pretty short amount of time.

“I hope everyone can agree that Knol doesn’t get some special boost or advantage in Google’s rankings.” heh, agreed. In fact, I’ve never noticed a Knol in the SERPs. It’s a mere blip in comparison to Wikipedia. But like you said, it takes time… … so good to see you are making the push up in the rankings look natural at least. 😛

Don’t get me wrong, I like Knol – there is a real ‘Digg’ like atmosphere to the popularity of articles and bringing the cream of the crop to the top (ie, use for spam and you won’t even make a ripple).

However, for me, there is a fundemental flaw (which is still present to this day):

Navigation.
I absolutely detest the homepage. It’s all so… wishy, washy and random! Unless something catches your eye on the homepage, ya kinda screwed, because I don’t see an A to Z categorisation, a sitemap or anything of the sorts. I find this very frustrating to say the least and not exactly user-friendly… Well, not very user-friendly until you actually get in to the writting/posting articles process and I really like that bit, but I wonder how much talent is lost on a daily basis due to the above.

But, as far as comparing Knol to Wikipedia, I’m not sure that the number of entries is a particularly useful measure, especially given the criticism about quality (and spam in particular). I’m much more persuaded by comparisons of traffic. But there it seems less clear that Knol is on a track to success.

Knol is a big enough idea to merit a long leash and plenty of time to develop. I’d be disappointed if they killed it. It deserves more time. I don’t personally see 100K articles as a very big milestone, though, considering the kind of press Knol got at launch. I certainly expect more than the chirp of crickets over there, but 100K isn’t impressive, nor is the quality of what I see. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, but I haven’t yet seen Google do a great job of managing a product that is more powered by people than code. They build some amazing code, but they also appear to believe that code can and should do everything. Do they have much expertise in how to foster a community of article writers? How to set the tone and make sure newcomers contribute? It doesn’t seem to me that Google has deep strengths in these areas. There are quite a few sites out there that do. It’s old hat, but I have gotten a lot of mileage out of About.com over the years. At this pace, Knol is years away from matching this AdSense-riddled Web 0.9 property, just out of sheer depth and accessibility. Beside old standbys like Yelp and Epinions, as well as new stars like Instructables and Wikihow, knol may not be terrible, but it is instantly forgettable. I think a lot of people just don’t know what it’s supposed to be, and that’s a problem. A marketing problem. Knock-knock: hey Google! Marketing isn’t all BS. Sometimes, it’s the simple task of figuring out how to name a product so people understand what it’s about. The cute tagline “knol: a unit of human knowledge” sounds expansive and brilliant for about 5 seconds, but then you’re lost as to what this site is for.

matt, get a clue. knol is garbage. it’s a waste of time and resources. It’s google, an evil profit greedy company you have to love because you work there, trying to kill off a benevolent and honest wikipedia.

We aren’t stupid. don’t insult our intelligence. We know what the f’ is up.

Matt, wikipedia’s quality arises from the actions of many people working on each article. But that doesn’t happen on knol.

The feedback system isn’t being used very much, and very very few knols are edited by anyone but the original author. One big reason for that is that even after edits the knols’ creator still gets the byline. Another is your low traffic.

Everything can’t be decided by feedback and ratings. If someone writes a missleading article and some of his friends give it 5 star rating, then what will happen? Do knol have any preventive features against this thing?

The question arose of Knoll, once started to publish an article I had a message on an infected site (gziped.gz – possibly infected SCRIPT.Virus), which comes as it turned out, when seeking to create a record in the knoll. How can you comment on this or that feature of the script on the client side? It is misleading user knoll. This computer is installed DrWeb

I wrote a well-thought article in Google Knol five months ago and until now that page has not been indexed by Google Search. I just wonder why. I was thinking Google would immediately index pages from Knol.

No disrespect to the team (it’s a decent product), but Knol is a bad idea for Google strategically. It creates the perception that Google MIGHT boost the pages unfairly in search, even though I personally trust that they don’t do that today. I think Google is better off focusing on being a gateway to content rather than a host of content. Private content, like my Gmail account, is less of a concern since it doesn’t impact web search.

Nicole, knols are tied to a Google account, plus you can verify your identity with a credit card or phone number. That tends to result in most trustworthy authors, all other things being equal. Also, a really good knol will attract links (and thus rankings) on the basis of its merit.

Alex, I’m not sure I understand your comment.

graywolf, my answer to that conspiracy theory is that Google will try to return the best information whether it’s on the general web, Knol, or even your site.

I like Knol it is so easy to set up a page and it looks tidy too. I hope it grows a lot – methinks it will as more people see that it really is simple to write and post about a subject.

I have a personal one all “about me” up there as I know all about me more than anything else.

At the moment myself and a couple of friends are working on a knol for a town we all know well. We’re not in a hurry we just add bits when we come up with some new tidbit. I’ll publish the page when it’s cool, ready and useful.

I absolutely love Wikipedia so see no reason why knol should not do really well – information is great.

I play Ukulele 😉 and found a terrific site through Wikipedia – Knol will get there just a matter of time in my opinion

I am sorry, but just when I click on a new knol gave a message about the virus, I am determined and it was characteristic of the anti-virus software:).

I think knol is another good service that lets you express yourself or create a profile on which to publish news. But as developers think right now to fight spam on Knol, although I have not seen, that came with knol spam or pages knol on a number of urgent requests for spam have been in the index google, but I think it would be in the future.

As I librarian, I would argue with Knol’s “authoritative” assertion. If even Wikipedia is savvy enough to provide disclaimers on the authority of its articles, a site that offers such insights as: “Cheese and milk doesn’t stir fry well and no one but the dastardly French — with their long waxy mustaches and desires to thwart freedom with their big double deck airplanes financed by outrageous government loans and their Magellan GPS system which you just know they’ll turn over to Arab terrorists — seem to enjoy cheese in their soup.” (see: Banana Milk, by self-proclaimed authority Karl Mamer), certainly has no right to this claim either.

Wikipedia relies on the collective wisdom of the masses to collect and present a body of knowledge. That an article such as the one referenced above would never last a minute on Wikipedia speaks to the, if not authority, than usefulness of Wikipedia over the assemblage of inanity that Knol seems to represent. Knol might have a role, but as a late-comer to the world of collaborative knowledge banks, it still wants for the attention that would make it useful, let alone authoritative.

> If you already have a blog, you could always stuff the info
> on your blog. But a ton of people occasionally want to
> post some info but don’t have or want a blog.

I could imagine there’s a crucial difference between a Knol article and a Blog post: people usually don’t expect the blog post to be updated constantly as time goes by (which would be required for many types of articles, if the post would want to reflect the current state of things, with things evolving). This type of expectancy can be a major burden with traditional homepages, but with blogs, people generally accept that the time stamp above the article means the thing was published at that point in time but may now be outdated in several ways.

The expectations towards a Knol entry on the other hand may be very different. And last time I checked, Knol had no good “write once, then open it up wiki-style for everyone *else* to handle updates too” feature (they have an “open it up” feature, but because you will still be listed as main author, opening it up and then stopping to care about it should not be a realistic option as you’d be perceived as being responsible, or even the author of what was written. You wouldn’t want your photo prominently reside on top of an article that’s being replaced by a spam message would you?).

It’s not really about size comparison at all. Of course Knol would be smaller than Wikipedia at this point. The fact that it’s experiencing a greater rate of growth should also come as no surprise, since its criteria for inclusion is infinitely broader than Wikipedia.

But it’s not about mere quantity (though that helps). It’s about quality.

Knol may be able to grow quickly, especially with the support of Google. But it is functionally incapable of improving, since it’s a single author site, and virtually no one allows others to edit their knols. This might be okay, if the best knols (if you define best as “written by an expert”, and most knols are not) really did float to the top on a subject. But that doesn’t happen.

0 ability to revise knols for the better + 0 ability for good knols to get visibility among the hundreds of others on the same topic = FAIL.

You know I’m a Google fan, but Knol is just Wikipedia the Google way and as it stands now, Google can’t give it any extra advantage in the rankings because it wouldn’t be good for Google as most would see that as a wasted link as a lot of the content is a waste.

I understand why Google are doing it, but is it really necessary?

It’s like how many times have I read an article about ‘is xxx the next Digg’ and I can’t remember what the name of the company is, because sometimes, a website actually does something that is unique and do it so well that you can’t copy it.

Now, Wiki has it’s problems but so will Knol – why don’t Google help out the guys at Wikipedia instead though?

Knol can evolve into a specialised knowledge search engine. There are some who say that google a universal search engine. According to them some specialised vertical search engines are taking away the search business.

Knol home page has the potential to evolve into a knowledge front of google. While Wikipedia has a certain editorial capability and is using it advantageously, google has a technology and search capability and it is using it and the knol platform provides a different opportunity than wikipedia. One can read from various comments written on various knols that some authors are committed to write on knol for a long time and they are not satisfied by the opportunity provided by Wikipedia.

“Also, a really good knol will attract links (and thus rankings) on the basis of its merit.”

Or the knol site in general will attract initial links just because it is THE GOOGLE LAUNCHING something NEW AND EXCITING so the entire webmaster blogosphere links to it, thus giving it a PR7 before it really deserves it, beginning the slow funnel of pagerank to all the knols.

I’m sure Knol will have a PR8 within a typical time frame for a ‘new’ website.

Sorry I am being sarcastic here Matt, but this idea really bothers me.

On the other side, I remember when I searched on a popular restaurant in my area, and saw maps.google pulling in reviews from OTHER CONTENT SITES, and applying a 4 star system. You could then click on “more reviews from CitySearch” (or wherever).

It seems that recently many affiliate sites been affected by some sort of penalty (a “filter” as you like to call it), having rankings go from page 1 to page X that no-one actually uses. Rankings drops literally overnight drop several pages for ALL keywords.

Funny enough that some of these sites are probably the best affiliate sites for that given niche (content wise of course), yet somehow Google decided they are not good enough and pushed them down, letting less quality stuff come up.

What’s the reason for this? Manual review? Brand names? and what one can do about this?

It would be fantastic if you could point me to some sort of solution or explanation to this situation.

Matt, thanks for posting about Knolls. I jumped right in as most SEO’s did. What did we have to lose, right? I agree I saw no benefit from it. In fact, it didn’t even show up for a while in the link portfolio. Eventually it did.

Matt, thanks for the information. I just posted my first knol and found it very easy to use. The title for my knol is Psychic Predictions For 2009 and contains my predictions for the coming year. Thanks again for this very useful resource. I hope to post many of my articles on the knol site and find the dichotomy between views on the knols affect on ranking algo’s and Google SERP’s quite interesting. By the way isn’t ranking dead?(lol)

Matt: My comment is not related to your post, but could Google please add a domain filter feature? Expert-exchange.com is the most annoying site on the Internet, many tech guys are looking for easy ways to filter results from it, I know I can exclude it by using ‘Advanced Search’.

This is a completely spam site, I really can’t understand why it gets top rankings for every tech keyword.

They spam my forum, I wouldn’t believe it until it happened, my forum was listed no. 1 for a new virus search, then they keep spamming this thread to link their paid topic.

They spam my email, never registered, and they keep sending me emails.

How do you think will knol become a significant online knowledge sharing system like Wikipedia? I am not suggesting that knol has to compete with Wikipedia, but what makes it not a me too type of site?
Do you think that knol is just an attempt to monetize Google traffic that is currently being sent to Wikipedia, and Google just wants to get a piece if the revenue?

Pretty amusing – you say Knol won’t get any free lunch in the page rank game, then in your PR7 blog from google spamteam, you give a dofollow link to Knol. That’s a free lunch. One of the whole ideas you (google) implicitly allude to in your page rank anti-farm mentality is that antimonopolistic business practives apply to page rank – if you have one good site, you can’t use it to support another one. Well, howzabout you earned a penalty with your free dofollow link farm in this post?

Matt, you seem to be very proud of Google teams’ response times but I have had TERRIBLE experience with Google Adsense product which Google makes the most money out of. I sent emails, posted on Adsense forum, none of the Google Adsense team member responded. If you check Payments section (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/label?lid=6cf15c1c0c5eb8cd&hl=en) you can actually see lot of people complaining about not receiving checks and payments and my 2 checks were cashed by somebody else. No response in 2.5 month from Google Adsense team and no *Money*, I feel very offended and disregarded. Even Yahoo! has customer service for their FREE email service, considering how big market share Google is holding, Google is terrible with customer service. My 2 cents.

Totally unrelated, totally relevant. As a usability guy I got started doing colorblindness studies in 1998. Not trying to self promote, just setting stage. 10% of men are colorblind and I have to say that your color choice for hyperlinks on this page is quite tough to read and, actually kind of a disquieting/disturbing color. Please consider changing it. Sorry to be off topic I am not on here often so if this has been addressed before, apologies once more. I am using Chrome if that changes anything.

1) As with Wikipedia – you cannot have an open to everyone system and claim that it will be an authority.
Thats no different than letting a bunch of school kids claim to be experts in physics… you are gonna get some damn strange data!
(More scary, you’ll probably get some good data too! ;))

2) (for those of you that didn’t see this coming!)
It is JavaScript only.
Sure – you can read it … you can read what others have put.
But if you do not have a JavaScript enabled device – thats all you can do.
You cannot comment.
You cannot rate things.
You cannot review.
You cannot edit.
You cannot create.
So there is a certain section of the public that cannot “use” the Knol.
We are not only talking about those using strange browser setups and odd security settings …. this can also include those using certain Assistive/Alternative technologies due to disabilities.

It is nice that you wrote on knol in your blog. I feel some google software experts can come together and involve their professors, batch mates and alumni and create good quality articles on computer science useful in BS and MS level courses. Google staff have the expertise and contacts, and network and knol is awaiting such contribution from them

It should be clear by now, that Google is dishonest towards the article writing webmaster world. I wrote some very good articles in Knol. Even after several weeks not indexed in Google! Also no rejection or request for modification from Google. When I write for free press release dot com of prlog dot org or pr dot com etc, the news pages with my articles are indexed in 30 minutes! (search term = my url). I smell something fishy!

So knol came in with a bang….. Natalya I’m sure your press releases did do well, because they already had a distribution network set up specifically to spread that press release all over the internet. You are comparing apples to oranges I think. New sites always take time to become valuable….wikipedia wasn’t a huge success right out of the gate.

Wish the world were always that simple!
Came to the Knol cross-roads. Had not heard of Knol b4, or forgotten about it.
Knol or not Knol, that’s the question.
80 comments to “Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO” is the answer.
Not Knol.
Simple.

I posted my very first Knols this evening.
I ESPECIALLY love the translate feature !
I live in Tampa Florida, and there are many Spanish and Hindi speaking people here.
I translated both of my Knols into both languages, easily.
I think the Knols area wonderful idea.
Wonder if Google will allow custom URL’s on them one day like they offer on my 2 Google Blogs ??

I see that KNOLS are showing up in Google search results now. I noticed today that mine is at number #7 in a Google search for … scavenger hunt clues. And for the more important… scavenger hunts… it’s at #37. My KNOL wasn’t anywhere on the Google search map a year ago (unless I typed in the full title of the article and did an advanced search), so KNOL must be gaining traction in the search engines and taking it’s place.

Google Knols solves the huge problem with wikipedia, viz., anyone can change what your write in wikipedia. Once that happens, the result is consensus. If Copernicus were alive today, his contribution to Wikipedia would be trashed by consensus. I found the problem in Wikipedia’s article on Garrett Hardin. No matter how precisely I could document a different view, consensus reigned.

So … in the long run, Knols (at least some of ’em) will be cited and Wiki articles will always be pedestrian, never deviating from consensus (except on minor topics that few people care about). Ever notice where the world is heading? It’s driven by consensus — just maybe that’s the problem. Thankfully, … Googles’ Knols are not joining the consensus parade.

“The Knol team is not standing still.”
Is there actually still a Knol theme this time? I still think Knol is the place for the purpose you explained in this post, but I think Knol is often to be forgotten by Google itself..

Why didn’t they add the +1 button to it f.e.? (Same as for Chrome Extensions and Reader)

So, is there still a team working on Knol, or is this project dying slowly?